To A Stranger, Walking

It cannot be that your believing heart
Is unlike mine, or married elsewhere well
To something foreign, feeling felt apart
From each of us; fair as you walk, I fell
All false untruths that we are not the same,
That you, stranger, live in far stranger ways
Than I can know, or play some different game.
I must object, and say we spend our days,
The both of us, but reaching for a dream
We cannot name. In this, we are the same;
And so shall it remain until the gleam
Of Death well blinds us, strips us of our claim.
The human curse of hope connects us one,
While both we walk apart beneath the sun.

In the Foothills

In the foothills, helped along by horses,
The rutted mud-cart wheels of wood and steel
Roll on and up past thatch-hut homes by noon,
Up to where the hill crests in splendid view
And far vales undulate in green commune;
So far until my tired eyes give up
And grow to close and sleep all afternoon,
My head a'rest on muddy wheels of wood,
Till night comes, and I wake beneath the moon.

V.

I want nothing of the World's loveless gifts,
When time and time again I, searching, see
That all I long to hold just moves and shifts
And ne'er becomes what I wish it to be.
My friend, are we to carry on like this?
With heaving weight of weariness and woe?
Or is it but my own sole fate to miss
The days when, in the sun, my heart would grow?
These eyes are dimmed now; empty hands still grasp
At shadows numberless and vastly ranged
O'er the path to the Precipice----I gasp!
I cannot know myself, as I have changed;
Ah, but change e'er the Seasons softly will,
And bring my heart from Spring to Winter still.

IV.

Green hills of Rutland County, under snow
You lie and lately freeze; your farms of frost
And lonely roads all speak of someplace lost---
Green hills, white hills, O how I long to go!
A late sun slants across your back, a bow
Of gold resplendent; ground-ward, light be tossed
And scattered o'er the freezing hills, and crossed
Beneath the trembled bowers hanging low.

When summer dusts the forests green and brown,
I will remember then when you were white,
Night-glinted by the moon, and shuttered down;
Or when, over the snow, a waning light
Would linger yet, and on me place its crown
Of ice and gold, so beautiful and bright!

III.

Would that I were asleep inside the earth,

Beneath the bosom-loam, the mothering womb;

I'd sleep my days and nights away in dark

Till dawn or Death come take me from my tomb.

The air, the cold, cold air is far too much

For these weak lungs to bear; the sun too bright

For eyes like mine to open. And I touch

The soulless streets of Man in crowded night

To feel my hand recoil, and my feet

Begin to run for yonder fields of gold!

---Ah! my grassy heart which longs for the wood

And buried root, between the matted fold

Of earth and earth, to happily consume

Myself into myself inside that womb!

II.

World-held---the thing as hung upon a string
In space, a hanging ball of wet and earth
Where pagan clans would dance around the birth
Swell'd upward, fire and wood surrounding, sing
And breathe up burning embers through the ring
Of sky and star collected; drunken mirth
Reflected in the beaker full of worth
Called wine---When, falcon-flown on distant wing,
The Watcher in his eye beholds the heaven
Then beneath him, and the world weightless,
Brightly hanging, placeless, one and seven
Lamplights in the void, the vaulting faceless
Wane of Gaia, wild in its course of ken---
Oh, but to stand on ancient Earth again!

I.

What waste and squandered Life when on these shores

Of premature Regret I lay me down―

Down on tired sands that keep me from the fret

And fever of a world in chains. What Life!

Life that once was, now lost and nothing more

To Lethe tides, and torn as from a book

Like leaves that ever beckon you to look

Inside, to stand before that which you fear.

I cannot look, and neither can I stand,

For here upon the sand, I soon forget

That wasted life, my premature Regret,

Here upon the fading banks of Lethe.